Stuff I Like (the long version, including info dump)
This is the old version, and I’m planning to redo it sometime. You can safely skip it.
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Things I like
People keep on wanting to know what sort of things I’m into, so I thought that I would make a page about myself, and things I like, and things I am interested in. It is a work in progress. But it might help you to know what I am like a little bit better. It’s kind of like an “about me” page. Or I have done it in lieu of an proper about me page.
Me in a snapshot…
Where or how might you find me growing up? I’d be found reading a Terry Pratchett novel, drinking a cup of tea, or playing video games. As life went on.. what was I into? I loved music. For music I listened to stuff like Pink Floyd or Supertramp. When it came to TV, I loved shows like Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons, or (don’t laugh) Scrubs. I also liked Black Books and an obscure show named Kyo Kara Mao. For movies I preferred comedy or action, like Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, Kung Pao, Anchor Man, or anything with either Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I used to love Adam Sandler movies (yes, I know I have bad taste), Jim Carey and I adored a little known movie called “Beverly Hills Ninja” starring Chris Farley. I also like uncomplicated action adventure movies such as the Count of Monte Christo, Equilibrium, the Matrix and the Lord of the Rings (but everybody likes the LOTR). There is nothing wrong with straightforward action adventure movies. Just like there is nothing wrong with unsophisticated humour. I dislike movies like Pineapple Express, Meet the Parents and the Royal Tenenbaums. I used to play a a lot of video games, I was basically an addict, but I loved my addiction. I preferred first person shooters, like Halo 2, Counterstrike, Quake 3, Natural Selection, Day of Defeat and Half Life 1 death match. I was a massive gamer. Gamer was my identity/culture, not just my favourite pastime. I also liked RPGs like Morrowind (and other elder scrolls) and miscellaneous games like the Sims, Red Alert, Warcraft and Age of Empires. Gaming was a massive part of my life, my family even used to own a computer shop where we sold games and consoles, as well as PCs and macs. I got very good marks in school/university. I have (had) a good sense of humour, and I enjoyed puns and sarcasm, as well as having a good memory for jokes. I used to enjoy some sports/fitness as well. Much of this was before I became unwell at age 18, or in the several years afterwards.
I am planning to rework this whole page. But first I need to write up an abbreviated life story from my birth in 1988 until Amanda got pregnant in 2022. And then a second story, covering my life from early 2022 until today.
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Some people might be unfamiliar with some of the games I played, so here are some samples of footage from the games I liked. You can skip this section if you want. It’s not very important. I might suggest watching 3-4 minutes of the first video under the heading “natural selection”. And that’s about it.
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I love books, music, tea, walking, cats, and first person shooters. By the way, I love walking because it lets me clear my head, but also gives me time to think.
I’d like to list some things I like, so that I’m not just guy on “invisible-aether-twitter” (aka space-travel-chat-mode) ranting. Umm. Just to let ppl know what I like??!
I’m just like.. some guy, you know??! Yeah?!
I am extremely badly sleep deprived, I’m hurting physically. Yet here, we are lol.
The Clock of the Long Now
Structures, or why things don’t fall down by J E Gordon
Antifragile - Nassim Taleb
The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
The Long Earth by Pratchett + Baxter
The Swiss Family Robinson - Johann David Wyss
Discworld, all (huge fan)
Amusing ourselves to death - Postman
Grisham, lots
Omnivores Dilemma - Pollan
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Dune - Frank Herbert
Books about organic gardening, sustainability and self sufficiency
Books about organic farming
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Across the Nightengale Floor
P.G. Wodehouse
Sirens of Titan - Vonnegut
Cats Cradle - Vonnegut
Three Body Problem Trilogy - Liu Cixin
The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacob
In defence of food - Pollan
Place of my own - Pollan
Treasure Island
Poems for a world gone to shit
Yeats - isle of inisfree
Thoreau - men say they know many things
Robert Louis Stevenson - Escape at Bedtime
Dickinson - I’m nobody
federico garcía lorca - cancioncilla del primer beso
Rumi, just a few snippets - I like his quotes on silence
The White Feather - P.G. Wodehouse
Dance, Dance, Dance - Murakami
Making Money - Pratchett
The Napoleon of Notting Hill - G.K. Chesterton
After the quake - Murakami
Dumbing us down* - John Taylor Gatto (grain of salt)
Castle in the Sky - Dianna Wynne Jones
Introduction to Criminological Thought - Trevor Bradley, Reese Walters
A few first year textbooks in sociology, psychology, law from the victoria university curriculum.
Some other humanities readings
I studied some post modernism in business school
“The Long Earth”, and “Structures, or why things don’t fall down” are probably my two favourite books, followed by Dance, Dance, Dance and Amusing Ourselves to Death. But I’m fanatical about Terry Pratchett. I like books that make me laugh, have some good social commentary, but they’re fundamentally morally “decent”, and the good guys often win, and can be a bit schmultzy at the end of the day. I also like Ray Bradbury, or I used to! But now I think he’s evil. I kind of love/hate the long rain, and the pedestrian. Those two stories motivate some of what I do.
I love books. I could read all day. I love and adore reading. It’s one of my favourite pastimes.
What sort of people do I look up to?
Gregor Mendel, Sir Ernest Rutherford, Michael Faraday and William Wilberforce are heroes of mine.
I also look up to people like Thomas Edison, J.E. Gordon, Alexander Graham Bell and Archimedes
Movies:
Kung Pow (this movie is a masterpiece) I love a good spoof/parody - this used to be my favourite movie when I was 14
Ace Ventura Pet Detective: Jim Carey movies were always a favourite of mine
I also liked Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty and The Truman Show
Monty Python: movies and compilations of clips from their TV show
Hot Shots! (starring Charlie Sheen) is a masterpiece, both one and two. It is a spoof of top gun. Spoof movies are the best. The primary reason that the original series have to exist is so that the spoof movies can exist.
Beverly Hill’s Ninja starring Chris Farley
Office Space: Jess Mackenzie’s father introduced me to this one
Pirates of the Caribbean
Gladiator: love it
Equilibrium
Lord of the rings: I love these movies, nz made and also amazing.
Dodgeball
Anchorman: between anchorman and dodgeball I made my peace with “bad” American comedy, and decided I loved it
Ong-Bak: this is the best martial arts movie I’ve seen
Jackie Chan: anything funny like the rush hour movies, Shanghai Noon. I also liked drunken master.
Adam Sandler: I like a ton of his works, especially Billy Madison and Waterboy! I loved Waterboy. I was addicted to that movie when I was 13.
Men in black 1+2: I like basic action movies. I never understood why movies have to be smart!
Matrix
Toy Story: a beloved childhood classic, and I owned it on VHS, and watched it to death. Ditto for Shrek.
Groundhog Day
Count of Monte Christo (it used to be my favourite movie, I like a good swashbuckler)
6th Day, Schwarzenegger
Jet Li - The One, Romeo Must Die (I love his choreography and fight scenes)
Austin Powers: one and two
Spaceballs
Hot Fuzz (the final action sequence in Hot Fuzz was amazing, a comedic masterpiece). I don’t like the cornetto trilogy in general, but that piece was good
Kung Fu Hustle
Star Wars was a beloved childhood trilogy
Amelie (my female friends made me watch it (not really haha) when I was in my teens, it’s totally a good movie thought. It actually is, it’s really funny.) it is a departure from my usual tastes, which is why I included it. Other comedy: I also liked Maddox’s website. It declined over time though. And I liked “Kristen Schaal is a horse”. It was a good bit. But I did not appreciate flight of the concords very much! No offence to them, but it just wasn’t for me. And I couldn’t get into Rhys Darby.
Television
Whose line is it anyway
Malcolm in the middle (it was favourite show as a child)
Black books
Kyo Kara Mao (so bad it was good, but actually good)
Scrubs: It’s mainstream, but solid. A bit lame, but actually good.
Music:
I like Pink Floyd, Queen, Supertramp, Guns and Roses, Deep Purple and Robbie Williams. I like classic rock.
I like a lot of other music too. When I’m feeling unwell I’ll listen to just about anything. It’s often just comfort listening. I’ll listen to anything comforting, or I’ll listen to anything banal enough to be relaxing or to help me to zone out. I'm not all that fussy if I'm unwell.
Games:
Halo Two
Counterstrike
Morrowind
Natural Selection (it’s a multiplayer half-life modification, or it’s basically quake if you don’t know anything about games)
Fable (it’s short, but really a good game. It gets short shrift among many people, but it was a good perfect little game that was worthy of more praise than it received)
Red Alert Two
Age of Empires Two
Garry’s Mod (I liked it back when it was good, sandbox mode, inventing and engineering things, toying with the physics engine)
I grew up on Theme Park, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim City, Sim Tower and The Sims, as well as Gran Turismo.
Quake Three Arena: demo mode (it was all my hewlett packard with integrated graphics could handle, I couldn’t even play half life, counterstrike or day of defeat). And my mother banned all shooters for me when I was a teenager. So I had to play in secret. When I got caught, I was in a lot of trouble. I had to play shooters at a friend’s place.
Unreal Tournament 2004
I played a ton of games growing up, in particular I played a lot of first person shooters. Or rather, I played a few first person shooters a lot.
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Some people might be unfamiliar with some of the games I played, so here are some samples of footage from the games I liked. You can skip this section if you want. It’s not very important. I might suggest watching 3-4 minutes of the first video under the heading “natural selection”. And that’s about it.
There is footage from many of the games I played available on the playlist linked below for people who want it, and are fanatical about games.
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Natural Selection
These clips videos are pretty good, and are much better than some of the other videos I linked to back in the past.
Army of wltrs:
Fananation:
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There are a few more videos of a variety of games that I played in the past on my YouTube profile. Warning, they’re not really sorted/filtered.
There is a full length game (only against bots) on that list, if you want to micro analyse what the gameplay of natural selection is likeS
It’s actually really hard to find good gameplay videos, because the game is long gone, and the demos all have a lot of latency built in. And the graphics aren’t very sharp when you rebuild something from “demos”.
Here is a “boring example” of a game played start to finish as a member of the marine team. It is just against CPU players, and the player is “nothing special”, and kind of a newbie and/or inexperienced. Please treat it as a demonstration of the gameplay mechanics and of the “feel of the game”, not an example of how hectic or challenging it is. It’s a perfectly serviceable example of playing a game of natural selection. The player in question loses, and I think perhaps on purpose.
Some of the videos look like they were recorded and edited on a potato, but so what.
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I also played a lot of counter-strike and Halo 2. I was the best Halo 2 player I knew when I was young, and I couldn’t find anyone better than me at school. I never entered any Halo 2 tournaments.
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Half life One Death-match: 15 second clip
My first first person shooter (it was love at first sight)
Unreal Tournament 2004: 15 second clip
Counterstrike 1.3: 15 second clip
Counter strike was such a groundbreaking game. It was massive.
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Podcasts:
I used to listen to a lot of podcasts. I like them, but also they were easy to listen to back when I couldn’t much else in life.
Firstly, I listened to a lot of “TwiT: this week in tech”. I learned a lot from that show. I wouldn’t trust the main host (Leo Laporte) as far as I could throw him! But he’s a good host and he knows his stuff. I learned a lot from his podcast network. Secondly, I liked Dan Benjamin and some of his work. He was a pioneer in podcasting, and knows a lot about technology as well as having a good sense of humour. Thirdly, I liked the Incomparable and their show “Total Party Kill”. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Fourth, I liked the history of Rome by Mike Duncan and Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. Podcasting is an excellent medium for history. And I have always loved history. The history of Rome is somewhat amateurish, but it’s easy to listen to and has its own kind of charm. Hardcore History is excellent, on both ancient history and the history of warfare from a “tactical” perspective. Lastly, I loved 99% Invisible by Roman Mars, it’s a great design podcast. At the end of the day, it’s all about problem solving in an intelligent manner that takes the “whole system” into account.
There is a lot of technology in there, and design. This might sound crazy to you, but I learned a lot about technology by listening to podcasts. I am extremely “technology oriented”. I am very interested in technology. And I think technology is a very good thing to study if you want to understand the world, and potentially engage in problem solving. I like scones and technology museums. And I enjoy reading books about science, engineering and technology.
I liked shows like wired, twit, twig, security now, triangulation, hosts like Gina Trapani, Steve Gibson, Jeff Jarvis, Andy Ihnatko, Father Robert Ballacer. I liked back to work with Merlin Mann (strangely enough). I listened to a lot of podcasts, especially about technology.. I must have listened to a hundred episodes of each of twit, twig, security now, triangulation. I was a tech podcast fanatic. And a ton of church planting and ministry podcasts too.
Here are a few lecture series I liked, I always loved learning about things link history and geography.
Epidemics in Western Society since 1600 - Frank Snowden, Yale, History 234
Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts - Keith E. Wrightson, Yale, History 251
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, David W. Blight, Yale, History 119
See openYale for more: https://oyc.yale.edu/courses
Global Geopolitics, Stanford Continuing Education, Martin Lewis, all ten lectures (approx 2 hrs per lecture)
China: Traditions and Transformations, HIST E-1825 Bol + Kirby, Harvard, 36 lectures, they remade it into a new set of series now though
More lectures available to read about on the “education and books that I have read page”.
I used to play the piano and a tiny bit of guitar.
Did a little bit of boxing and kickboxing in high school. And I did Judo when I was twelve.
I played hockey in third form. I played a few seasons of soccer in childhood, and table tennis as a teenager. I liked climbing trees. I was a fanatical tree climber in my childhood. I was crazy about trees. I know it sounds a bit eccentric, but why should I care what other people think? I loved climbing trees, and we had/have good trees in New Zealand. And the sex pest brigade and a bunch of peeping tops, busybodies and mediocre aging swingers and meddlesome middle-aged housewives (with back fat) seem to be running society, so what’s wrong with being eccentric about climbing trees in your youth, and admitting it as an adult? And as for the Chinese, they can lose 30 million under Mao Zedong and his deputy prime minister and education minister Xi Zhongxun during the great leap forward, after the purging of sociology, economics and Mendel’s genetics from the curriculums and then somehow (with a straight face) and say “he was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong”. Why shouldn’t I admit to being eccentric about climbing trees as a child in New Zealand. Besides, we have better trees than many part of the world.
I love cats, I’m not a dog person. I am nice to dogs, and I like them too (in small doses) but they’re not my cup of tea. Cats are the best. And I love kittens. [Amanda killed my favourite pet cat though!! She just took her to the vet one day to have her out down! Without my knowing it! And the vet then called me to pretend that my cat was hit by a car, rather than being out down. Amanda is a monster! Cupcake was my pet cat’s name. This happened years ago.]
Ummm. I don’t have a great relationship with my family?? I don’t exactly have many friends… I used to be sociable, but yeah.. I used to be sociable. I love socialising. But I haven’t been able to socialise so easily at certain parts of my life,
I like farmers markets, cooking new things
I want a large library. I’d love to have a large library. I love books.
Socialising: I used to organise get togethers.
I’d organise things like Saturday Halo days where 8-12 of us get together to play video games and eat pizza. I’d order the pizza and arrange furniture beforehand.. When older, I was the one to invite every one over to Sunday lunch, to eat and play board games like settlers of Catan or card games like Bang!. I used to drag about 20 people to play games at the local internet cafe. We played games like battlefield (or whatever). I was sociable, and I used to be a massive video game guy.
University: two years commerce degree at Victoria university in Wellington. A+ student. I studied accounting and finance.
I like tea, I like oolong tea and a strong cups of ordinary black tea (Dilmah). I like ordinary tea. Ordinary tea is fine. Good stuff doesn’t have to be fancy stuff. Just like beer. Beer doesn’t have to be fancy.
At the moment I am drinking Fu Shou Shan High Mountain (Taiwan).
Card games and board games:
I used to spend a lot of time just hanging out playing card games like scum (president and pauper) with people like David Walker, or Jessie Hendie, Jess Mackenzie etc. I also used to play blitz, hearts or whatever with family. I always liked playing board games like polyconomy, Risk, or whatever, with family. I liked the card game “Bang!” with friends, or the board game Settlers of Catan. I also enjoyed playing games like guitar hero and rock band with my friends too. Those sorts of things are just part of socialising, but are also fun in themselves. Playing basic card games and board games were kind of like the “dial tone” for my social life. You just play them as a matter of course. It’s not that the games themselves were the be all and end all, but it was just great hanging out. It’s both the games and then people. It’s just good. What mean, is that I’m not fussy about the actual game itself, just so long as it’s good. I just like normal hanging out and playing games and eating food!?!?!?!!!??!!!!!?!!@!$&?@%%$##!?!? And socialising.
I love walking, it is one of my favourite things to do. It gives me time to think. And especially to come up with ideas. Dreaming up new ideas, and working on them while I walk, is important to me. Night walks are good too, they’re relaxing and refreshing. They’re just for unwinding and idling my mind. The day time walks are for serious thinking. Or mulling things over.
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Uhh. To repeat : my comfort zone is sitting at the computer with a strong cup of tea, black with milk, playing a video game. A first person shooter like half life one, counter strike, quake 3 arena or natural selection (natural selection was built on the half life one engine, which itself was built on the quake engine). Or perhaps an RTS or RPG such as morrowind, red alert or age of empires. My other comfort zone is laying in the middle of the floor laughing maniacally while reading a Terry Pratchett novel. And my other natural habitat, or mode of being, is being ensconced in books from the library or Amazon, followed by going for long walks to dream ideas. That is, I go for long walks so that I have time to come up with ideas. I like to invent new ideas and possibilities inside my head, after feeding my mind with books and other materials. Walking gives me time to think.
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I’m interested in conservation and/or the organic movement. Or at least I would like to get into it one day. Things like re-wilding, regeneration of forest, or nature sanctuaries appeal to me. Zealandia and Kapiti Island are good examples, as is that forest down south, linked to in the above link. I’ve never been into it that much in the past, at least in a practical sense. But I would like to give it a go. Definitely!
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Here is my favourite poem (I’m not much of a poetry guy tbh). But I think I’m obliged to try to be cultural, or whatever. And it is a good and peaceful poem. Even just reading it is relaxing.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree - Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
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I’m Nobody! Who are you?
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!
By Emily Dickinson
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